I would rather take the money spent on this mission and invest it in a team of hackers to create another fappening. I mean, space is cool, but not as cool as celebrity tits and buttholes.
Closest approach was a couple hours ago 9pm ET we'll have good pictures rolling in, with even better tomorrow morning Handful of months down the road and we'll start to receive the money shots
Nat Geo is having a special at 9pm tonight called 'Mission Pluto' complete with images and behind the scenes. Should be awesome
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/faq/index.cfm?Category=Mercury What color is Mercury? Why does it appear grey? Mercury has color properties that would appear greyish-brown to the human eye. The color is controlled by the composition of the rocks that form the planet's surface, and the modification that they suffer as a result of impacts of all sizes (ranging in size from dust motes to tens or hundreds of kilometers). The surface of Mercury is also modified by energetic particles (mostly protons and electrons) from the solar wind.
so how do the scientists communicate with this thing? i think i read that pluto was 13 light hours away, so if they want to send a command they shoot it out of some satellite or something then 13 hours later it gets acted upon? and communication from the new horizons i imagine are on a similar delay? once the delay is taken out, what kind of data transfer rate do they get?
i got an A on my second grade styrofoam model of the solar system and it had pluto in it. pluto will always be part of my solar system.
I think they receive some data in that time frame, but i think it takes months to actually receive all of the content.
It's a lot like piloting a large boat, I'd imagine. You gotta plan ahead. Start stopping before you need to stop and start turning before you need to turn.
Downloads at 1kb per second if I remember correctly. Takes about 40 minutes to download a 24mb picture. Its slower than dialup but remarkable in and of itself.
Steven Martens @Waxieke @NASANewHorizons #asknasa @NASA how many pictures will be taken in the flyby? an estimate number is ok ;) NASA New Horizons @NASANewHorizons 20m20 minutes ago About 1500 LORRI images will be taken - Carey
Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson 2m2 minutes ago Dear Pluto, Lookin’ good. But you’re still a Dwarf Planet — get over it. Love, Neil deGrasse Tyson
the JWST will be in orbit well past the MOON at L2 hubble is not even really in full space :excite: i would gladly pay 10 bucks more in taxes dedicated solely to NASA for strictly deep space and human exploration and all you other scrubs should/would too.
basically, to see how fucking crazy it is to get a school bus in fucking orbit outside of the moon using nothing but math...
So honestly I wasn't sure what the fuck is going on but this is awesome now. When will NASA release ALL the initial details / pics of Pluto?
I didn't realize how long this has been in the making. Good doc on the entire mission, they can add about 30 mins on the doc once they get most of the images back. From what I understand it could take up to 16 months to gather all the info.
Epic Cosmos @EpicCosmos 2m2 minutes ago Topography shows #Pluto may have internal activity possibly volcanoes under surface. Alan Boyle @b0yle 30s30 seconds ago "That's a really important discovery." MT @JPMajor: Pluto shows tidal heating not necessary to power recent geological activity #PlutoFlyby Lee Billings @LeeBillings 54s54 seconds ago Stern: "We now have an isolated small planet that's showing activity after 4.5 billion years.. sends "geophysicists back to drawing boards" Alan Boyle @b0yle 3m3 minutes ago John Spencer: Mountains are up to 11K feet high, made of Pluto's "bed ice." #plutoflyby Phil Plait @BadAstronomer 29s30 seconds ago Pluto has mountains of water ice, coated with thin surface of methane and nitrogen ice. Alien world indeed.
New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body. The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago -- mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system -- and may still be in the process of building, says Jeff Moore of New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI). That suggests the close-up region, which covers less than one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today. Moore and his colleagues base the youthful age estimate on the lack of craters in this scene. Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered -- unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks. “This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” says Moore. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape. “This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,” says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. The mountains are probably composed of Pluto’s water-ice “bedrock.” Although methane and nitrogen ice covers much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to build the mountains. Instead, a stiffer material, most likely water-ice, created the peaks. “At Pluto’s temperatures, water-ice behaves more like rock,” said deputy GGI lead Bill McKinnon of Washington University, St. Louis. The close-up image was taken about 1.5 hours before New Horizons closest approach to Pluto, when the craft was 478,000 miles (770,000 kilometers) from the surface of the planet. The image easily resolves structures smaller than a mile across. Image Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI
Charon Remarkable new details of Pluto’s largest moon Charon are revealed in this image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), taken late on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 289,000 miles (466,000 kilometers). A swath of cliffs and troughs stretches about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from left to right, suggesting widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely a result of internal processes. At upper right, along the moon’s curving edge, is a canyon estimated to be 4 to 6 miles (7 to 9 kilometers) deep. Mission scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters on Charon. South of the moon’s equator, at the bottom of this image, terrain is lit by the slanting rays of the sun, creating shadows that make it easier to distinguish topography. Even here, however, relatively few craters are visible, indicating a relatively young surface that has been reshaped by geologic activity. In Charon’s north polar region, a dark marking prominent in New Horizons’ approach images is now seen to have a diffuse boundary, suggesting it is a thin deposit of dark material. Underlying it is a distinct, sharply bounded, angular feature; higher resolution images still to come are expected to shed more light on this enigmatic region. The image has been compressed to reduce its file size for transmission to Earth. In high-contrast areas of the image, features as small as 3 miles (5 kilometers) across can be seen. Some lower-contrast detail is obscured by the compression of the image, which may make some areas appear smoother than they really are. The uncompressed version still resides in New Horizons’ computer memory and is scheduled to be transmitted at a later date. The image has been combined with color information obtained by New Horizons’ Ralph instrument on July 13. New Horizons traveled more than three billion miles over nine-and-a-half years to reach the Pluto system. Image Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI
Hydra Emerges from the Shadows Since its discovery in 2005, Pluto's moon Hydra has been known only as a fuzzy dot of uncertain shape, size, and reflectivity. Imaging obtained during New Horizons' historic transit of the Pluto-Charon system and transmitted to Earth early this morning has definitively resolved these fundamental properties of Pluto's outermost moon. Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) observations revealed an irregularly shaped body characterized by significant brightness variations over the surface. With a resolution of 2 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel, the LORRI image shows the tiny potato-shaped moon measures 27 miles (43 kilometers) by 20 miles (33 kilometers). Like that of Charon, Hydra's surface is probably covered with water ice, the most abundant ice in the universe. Observed within Hydra's bright regions is a darker circular structure with a diameter of approximately 6 miles (10 kilometers). Hydra's reflectivity (the percentage of incident light reflected from the surface) is intermediate between that of Pluto and Charon. "New Horizons has finally nailed the basic physical properties of Hydra," says Hal Weaver, New Horizons Project Scientist and LORRI science operations lead. "We're going to see Hydra even better in the images yet to come." Hydra was approximately 400,000 miles away from New Horizons when the image was acquired. Image Credit: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI Last Updated: July 15, 2015 Editor: Tricia Talbert